Al Sharpton’s National Action Network Salary Went Up 70 Percent Last Year

Al Sharpton got a 70 percent raise from his nonprofit last year, bringing his compensation above $412,000, according to new tax records filed last week.

The leading nonprofit watchdog, Charity Navigator, says $150,000 is the median compensation for the top executive at comparable organizations.

At more than $412,000, Sharpton’s compensation “is far beyond what we see in charities of this size,” even on the East Coast, says Charity Navigator’s spokeswoman, Sandra Miniutti.

National Action Network employed 34 workers throughout 2014, spending just over $1.9 million in total compensation.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Sharpton’s pay hike is well outside of what’s normal, Miniutti says; a standard increase for a nonprofit executive is between 1 percent and 3 percent. A raise of over 70 percent “is a pretty big jump in his compensation,” she says. “We typically don’t see that.”

Sharpton says that for a few years, he received no compensation at all from National Action Network. The organization’s tax filings confirm that in 2007 and 2008, he received no pay, and in 2006, he received less than $5,000.

So, Sharpton tells National Review: “My salary remains the same. For three years, they paid me nothing, and the board agreed they would pay me the three years [of] nothing.”

Even so, the timing seems somewhat peculiar, given that in 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013, Sharpton received between $240,000 and $250,000 — up from around $72,000 in 2005, before his salary hiatus. And in 2011, National Action Network paid him more than $541,000.

Sharpton’s explanation doesn’t fully satisfy Miniutti. “Generally speaking, that’s not how nonprofits operate,” she says. “They generally don’t not pay their CEOs, then kind of make it up down the line. It may be a red flag, it’s certainly unusual, and it’s not how charities typically operate.”

Charity Navigator listed National Action Network on its watch list last year, citing several of the nonprofit’s financial irregularities detailed in a lengthy New York Times article examining Sharpton’s finances.

#share#National Action Network’s 2014 submission to the Internal Revenue Service shows that the nonprofit is in its best financial shape in years. For the first time in more than a decade, it ended the year with positive net assets (just over $26,000) and no tax liabilities.

Advertisement

“I told you,” Sharpton tells NR, referencing the final $780,000 in payroll taxes that National Action Network paid off in the past year.

In 2014, Sharpton’s nonprofit paid nearly $102,000 to CGK Partners, a consultancy that recently listed Charlie King, once listed as National Action Network’s acting national director, as its chief executive officer.

National Action Network no longer lists Noerdlinger Media as an independent contractor. In 2013, it had paid more than $126,000 to the company, run by Rachel Noerdlinger, a former Sharpton spokesperson who went on to serve as chief of staff for Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray. She later left after a series of news articles highlighted, in the New York Times’s words, “ethics lapses, unpaid parking tickets, [and] a boyfriend with a serious criminal past.”

National Action Network also paid more than $104,000 to D. Johnson Design, Inc., for “consulting services.”

Advertisement

#related#A source familiar with National Action Network says it helps the nonprofit line coordinate special events and bring in sponsors. Dwight Johnson Design posts a partial client list on its website, including Verizon and NBC. The phone company was a sponsor of National Action Network’s annual convention last spring, as was Time Warner, NBC’s parent.

National Action Network’s tax filings says it gave $11,850 in charitable contributions but does not list the recipient. A spokesperson for National Action Network says the funds went to churches and other civil-rights organizations. He also confirmed that none of these charitable contributions went to Education for a Better America, an organization run by Sharpton’s daughter Dominique.

— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for National Reviewas a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center and as the Tony Blankley Chair for the Steamboat Institute.

Most Popular

Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) bucked his party on President Trump’s firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, remarking that his dismissal may have been “justified.”
“You know, his firing may be justified,” the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said on ABC’s ...
Read More

Labels multiply in supermarkets faster than salmonella at a convenience-store sushi bar. It’s important to keep up; we should all be well-informed eaters. But the onslaught of clean food, natural products, sustainably produced, gluten free, butterflies everywhere, and GMO-free sea salt are just too much. The ...
Read More

It can be hard to keep one’s wits about oneself during the Age of Trump. Our president is like the ringmaster of a circus, and the American people are his enthralled spectators. It seems as if we cannot get enough. Love him or hate him, he remains at the center of our public consciousness.
It is hard to ...
Read More

The “free college” movement, fueled to a large degree by Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential bid, is a response to concerns about increasing college-tuition rates, concomitant stagnation in state and federal grants, and a corresponding student-loan debt load that has ballooned to roughly $1.4 ...
Read More

Two chairmen of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference gave a resounding endorsement of a bill intended to prevent the government from discriminating against citizens based on their belief that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah reintroduced the First Amendment Defense ...
Read More

Of all the abrupt comings and goings in this administration, the dismissal of Rex Tillerson is undoubtedly the most important — maybe one of the most important firings since Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.
By dismissing MacArthur, Truman drew a firm line between military and ...
Read More

I am still chuckling at Hillary Clinton’s speech in India.
Among the things she said:
If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that own two thirds of America’s Gross Domestic product. ...
Read More

‘I’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life,” former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power tells Politico. “Though none as immortalized as that one.”
Wow. It’s a major concession. And what might “that one” be?
Not standing idly by in the White House while Iranians protested a fixed election in 2009, then ...
Read More